Critical Engagement, Community and the Subjects of Art History
A Dissertation Seminar Sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

Seminar Goals

       This is a work-in-progress seminar aimed at fostering dissertation writing. While the host department is Art History, the seminar is designed to embrace students in other humanistic disciplines who are centrally involved in the historical study of visual artifacts. Students from outside Art History are encouraged to apply.

       The seminar will have two components: an introductory colloquium featuring distinguished guest speakers, and an intensive writing workshop. The colloquium will explore two interrelated questions: first, how the diverse practices and concerns currently represented in the field of art history are related to broader concerns in the humanities; and, second, how the phase of close critical analysis or reading informs various sorts of historical narrative.

       Over the course of the workshop participants will be asked to reflect on the question of how the familiar critical tools of art history—ranging from stylistic evaluation, simple iconography and topographical description, to more complex forms of structural analysis—construe and give shape to their subjects.

Director

C. Jean Campbell is Associate Professor of Art History at Emory University.  She is the author of The Game of Courting and the Art of the Commune of San Gimignano (1998) and of articles on poetic culture and the visual arts in the urban centers of late medieval and early Renaissance Italy.  Her current work deals with vernacular poetics and the visual arts in fourteenth-century Tuscany, and includes The Commonwealth of Nature: Art and Poetic Community in the Age of Dante (forthcoming in 2008) as well as a short book project on Simone Martini and the origins of vernacular style in the visual arts. Dr. Campbell was Samuel H. Kress Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts in 2003-04, and was awarded a Winship Distinguished Research Professorship in the Humanities by Emory College for the years 2004-2007.

Colloquium Part 1:

Guest Speaker: Yve-Alain Bois, Ph.D.
"The Difficult Task of Erasing Oneself: Non-composition in Twentieth-Century Art"
March 27th, 2008, 5 pm., MCCM Reception Hall

Seminar session: "Pseudomorphism: What to Make of Look-Alikes?"
March 28th, 2008, 10-12 pm., MCCM Boardroom

Yve-Alain Bois is Professor at the School of Historical Studies of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton. Prior to this appointment he was Joseph Pulitzer Professor of Modern Art and Chair of the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University. He is co-editor of the Journal October, a curator and noted philosopher of art. Professor Bois’ books include Painting as Model (1990), Formless: A User’s Guide authored with Rosalind Kraus (1996), and Matisse and Picasso: A Gentle Rivalry (1998), the later two having been conceived in tandem with major exhibitions. He is also co-author with Benjamin Buchloh, Rosalind Krauss and Hal Foster of Art Since 1900 (2005), a major textbook on twentieth-century art.

Colloquium Part 2:
Guest Speaker: Jás Elsner, Ph.D.
"The Christian Museum:
Ancient Sarcophagi as Altars in France c.1600-2000"
Friday, April 25th, noon, MCCM Reception Hall

Seminar session: "On Ekphrasis in Art History"
April 25th, 4-6 pm., MCCM Boardroom

Jás Elsner is Humfry Payne Senior Research Fellow in Classical Art and Archaeology and has been at Corpus Christi College of Oxford University since 1999. Before that he was Lecturer and then Reader in the History of Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art of the University of London. He is currently also Visiting Professor of Art History at the University of Chicago. Professor Elsner’s interests are in all aspects of Classical art and its receptions, with a special emphasis on Roman art and early Christian art. He has worked on the interrelations of art and text, on art and religion (including patterns of pilgrimage to sacred images, in both ancient and contemporary cultures) and on the modern reception of Classical art in collecting, museum-formation, and Classicism. His recent publications include Roman Eyes: Visuality & Subjectivity in Art & Text (2007) and Pilgrimage in Greco-Roman and Early Christian Antiquity: Seeing the Gods, co-edited with Ian Rutherford (2005).

Writing Workshop:
Weekly from Thursday, May 29 through Thursday, June 26, 2008

Participants and Abstracts:

Amy Cooper Robertson, Graduate Division of Religion
Elizabeth Cummins, Art History
Susan Blevins, Art History
Kate Wilkinson, Graduate Division of Religion
Christina Parker, Comparative Literature
Jennifer Hughes, English
Sarah R. Kyle, Art History
Rachel Foulk, Art History
Matthew Edwards, Spanish and Portuguese
Peter Milne, Philosophy
Delinda Collier, Art History

Seminar Schedule